Abstract

This article analyses the (ab)uses of the category of emergency in Italian migration policies in dealing with the increasing presence of foreign labour migrants in Italian economy and society, focusing on the period of the early 2000s. It explores its causes from a historical perspective by showing how despite Italian institutional actors have encountered migrant workers since the 1960s, it was only in the second half of the 1980s that a legal definition of “migrant” was introduced, substituting the only juridical definition of “foreigner” which existed in the Italian legal system and which was inherited from the Fascist laws of 1931. The article compares continuities and changes in the evolution of Italian migration law and policies toward migrants legally and illegally residing in Italy since the 1990s, by critically assessing approaches of the Italian Left and Right, the role of the EU laws on free movement of foreign citizens and the growing engagement of regional institutional bodies and local administrations. It then presents one of the several emergencies concerning the presence of migrant population in Italian cities in the 2000s by focusing on the city of Bologna and more in particular the Scalo Internazionale Migranti. Scalo Internationale Migranti was born in October 2002 and it defined the heterogeneous group composed by migrants of Romanian nationality, local activists in different political organisations and charity organisations’ members, which squatted an abandoned building owned by the Italian national Railways. The articles shortly narrates the activities which the Scalo Internazionale Migranti carried out and the reaction of the local authorities and press from its establishment to its end in March 2005, when the building was evacuated.